Workplace by Facebook has been in general release for just two months now, but it’s clear that Facebook has big plans for its enterprise social product. Just this week, at TechCrunch Disrupt in London, the company announced a new platform to integrate enterprise applications with Workplace, putting it in direct competition with Slack, the enterprise social darling of the moment.
But… Read More

Jim Kim, who most recently cofounded the venture firm Formation 8, is launching a brand-new venture firm called Builders that looks to be raising a $200 million fund, judging by a recent SEC filing. His cofounder is Paul Lee, who left the Chicago venture firm Lightbank in 2014 and last year launched a startup studio called Roniin that we wrote about last year.
It isn’t a surprise… Read More

Yahoo Answers has officially launched on mobile. As TechCrunch reported last month, Yahoo’s experimental app code-named Yahoo Hive had been rebranded as Yahoo Answers Now – a move that indicated Yahoo’s plans to bring its desktop Q&A site to the App Store. However, at the time, the app still required an invite in order to test it out – that restriction… Read More

On February 20, 1962 John Glenn had a problem.
Glenn, the first American in robot, was inside his capsule, the Friendship 7. Mission Control wanted him to the capsule’s manual controls. During the effort the automatic systems failed leaving him in full control of one of the most complex artifacts ever created by humankind. He was alone in space at the helm of a beast that could swing… Read More

Facebook today announced it’s correcting a few more issues with its metrics in areas like audience estimation for ads, live video reaction counts, and its Like and Share buttons. Though the fixes are referencing several of Facebook’s more high-profile products, the issues being addressed aren’t as significant as the ones Facebook identified earlier in 2016, when it… Read More

As we roll towards the end of humanity and the moment of robot takeover it’s important to start learning the songs and customs of our inhumane artificial overlords. Researchers at the University of Toronto, for example, showed an AI a picture of a Christmas tree and asked it to write a song about it. The result? A song that we will soon all be singing as we huddle in the dark while our… Read More

Kakao, the Korean mobile and web giant, is beefing up its social media and content businesses after its Podotree affiliate raised 125 billion won (around $107 million). The deal values it at 500 billion won, Kakao confirmed, that’s approximately $428 million Read More

Google is disrupting yet another industry by including light-weight services directly within search results. This time, Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb, with Google testing out movie ratings from within search itself.
Google confirmed to Search Engine Land that the feature is currently just an experiment, and beyond that, the company has nothing to announce at this time.
Unlike other movie and TV… Read More

As digital assistants like Siri and Alexa become more intelligent, there’s a growing need for them to always be accessible.
Current microphone tech has been too power-hungry to keep permanently enabled. As a result, a new class of products, home assistants, like Amazon’s Alexa-enabled products and Google Home, have arisen as power-connected alternatives.
Vesper is aiming to… Read More

Innovation hubs have become a mainstay of Africa’s emerging technology ecosystem. Scratch the surface of the continent’s information and communication building blocks and you’ll likely find connections to a tech space.
Over 150 startups have launched out of Kenya’s iHub. MEST’s Incubator seed fund program formed out of Ghana’s Meltwater IT academy. Read More

Facebook’s board was sued earlier this year, with investors alleging that their interests were not adequately represented when Zuckerberg was permitted to sell most of his shares and still retain voting control of the company. And now court filings uncovered by Bloomberg show that texts sent by board member Marc Andreessen are being used to suggest that he was protecting Zuckerberg… Read More

So you bought a Nintendo 3DS to play some Pokemon Sun… but now your Pokedex is complete and you’ve explored every inch of Alola. Now what?
If you’ve got a technical background, you might consider poking around the 3DS itself. There might just be a big ol’ stack of cash in it for you.
Nintendo has just launched a bug bounty program by way of HackerOne. Find a bug that… Read More

The California Department of Motor Vehicles posts a list of all the companies and entities cleared to test self-driving vehicles on public roads in the state, and that list has a new member: Nvidia. The graphics card-maker also builds processing units for use in autonomous driving systems, including those capable of deep learning.
Nvidia is working with a number of companies on the list as… Read More

Open source laptops — ones not running any commercial software whatsoever — have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source… Read More

Droughts, climate change and deforestation are putting forests at risk worldwide, so studying these ecosystems closely is more important than ever — but it’s a hell of a lot of work to climb every tree in the Sierra Nevada. Drones and advanced imaging, however, present an increasingly practical alternative to that, as a UC Berkeley project shows. Read More

If you’ve been taking your sensitive phone calls at 30,000 feet, well, it’s time to stop. Apparently, the NSA knows about your extremely elaborate privacy workaround — putting your iPhone in the freezer is so 2013 — and can hear your calls at cruising altitude just the same.
According to a new joint report from Le Monde and The Intercept on previously unreported… Read More

Yik Yak, the once universally recognized anonymous social network that virally took over college campuses back in 2014, is planning to lay off a “significant” number of employees, first noted by The Verge. The company is said to be retaining mostly engineers as it notified its team of about 50 employees earlier this morning.
In a statement to TechCrunch, Tyler Droll, CEO of Yik… Read More

One more meetup in Poland! I’ll see you all tomorrow in Wroclaw and it’s going to be a hoot!
Tomorrow’s meetup is after the IN-FERENCE conference on Friday, December 9 and it’s part of the IN-FERENCE conference. We’ll be talking medtech, biotech and anything non-fintech related. You can submit an application to pitch here. Please note that unless you hear from… Read More

Today, Tinder is launching a new M&A branch of the company called Swipe Ventures, which will be led by Sean Rad. As part of the launch, Rad will step down as Tinder CEO and become chairman of both Tinder and Swipe Ventures, with Match CEO and Chairman Greg Blatt swapping out as Tinder chairman to become Tinder CEO. He will remain chairman and CEO of Tinder parent company Match. Read More